Skip to main content

Anton Chekhov's The Duel


Looks like Chekhov is hot property these days.  Here's a review by Manhola Dargis on the latest adaptation,

The film appears to have come out of nowhere — it hasn’t been making the usual rounds on the festival circuit — so it’s welcome news that it’s been given a berth at Film Forum in Manhattan for its world premiere. It’s the third feature by Dover Kosashvili, a Georgian-born Israeli who made a strong debut with his 2001 “Late Marriage,” about an Israeli man hiding his affair with a divorced mother from his domineering family. Once again, Mr. Kosashvili mixes moments of bitterness and laughter with strong dramatic passages, creating a social milieu in “The Duel” that is believably inhabited, consistently surprising and true-feeling in detail and sweep. (Its most unattractive feature is that ungainly title.) 

Anyone up for The Duel?

Comments

  1. Good, rick. Interesting that there appears to be no trailer for this new film.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Funny, how the full number of comments aren't coming up. Maybe this one will click the comments over on the lead page.

    The pictures I've found for The Duel look lavish. It seems a lot of passion has been put into making this film.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Started The Duel yesterday and am thoroughly enjoying it. Although the title suggests a fateful conclusion to the story, Chekhov seems to approach it a comic way. Laevsky and Von Koren are fantastic characters.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fantastic story! I really liked his "naturalistic" approach and the way he resolved the tensions. I also enjoyed his allusions to Pushkin's Onegin and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, they fit his characters' thoughts and demonstrated how literature is woven into the fabric of Russian cultural life, at least during that time.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ward No. 6

Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892.  It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921.  In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town.  He  introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster.  It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin.  Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.

Light and Dark

I'm still trying to sort out the ending.  The story had to end tragically but was surprised that Rogozhin actually sought forgiveness in Myshkin after what he had done to Nastya, although I think that Dostoevsky intended the two to be read as one, along similar lines as The Double .  He kept Rogozhin a shadowy figure throughout the novel, ever lurking in the dark of the Prince's soul.  Try as he might, Prince Myshkin could not alter events and thus the fantasy world he had lived in upon returning to Russia crumbled before his eyes, leaving him at a total loss as how to reconcile himself with it. Once again, Dostoevsky plumbs great depths of the human soul.  This is a psychological drama told in theatrical terms, perfectly suited for the stage.  Characters appear and disappear as if moving from the shadows of the stage.  I can see the "green bench" as the central stage piece.  In the final part, one gets the sense that Lebedev is orchestrating events, and may even

The Morning of Our Motherland

I was watching a History channel special on Socialist Realism art of the Soviet Union and this was one of the grand canvases that is now stuffed away in the Tretyakov State Gallery .  The painter was Fyodor Shurpin and he had a wonderful eye for detail, right down to the secret service black car on the road to Stalin's right.  To the left, one sees a row of combines turning over the field of golden wheat, which became symbolic of Stalin's Soviet Union.  Утро нашей Родины is from 1949, with Stalin radiating a post-war confidence.  It is also known as  Dawn of our Fatherland and other titles. Shurpin was one of the better artists to carry over from the pre-war years.  The narrator pointed out how socialist realist art changed dramatically as a result of the war, becoming much more static and propagandist in appearance.  He pointed to two stops along the Moscow subway as an example of this divide.  Here, Shurpin essentially transposes Stalin for an earlier "Mother"